Do Lobbyists Own The American Political System?

By Paul Nevins on October 4, 2010 2:30 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

Max Baucus is a United States Senator from the state of Montana, which ranks forty-fourth in population, with approximately 970,000 inhabitants. However, by virtue of his position as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and his secure senate seat, Senator Baucus was able to ignore the wishes of a majority of the American public when he refused to include a public option in the purported health insurance reform legislation that he shepherded through his committee. A discussion of a possible single-payer system was not even entertained, but scores of lobbyists from private health insurance companies were patiently listened to and many of their concerns and requests for special protections were addressed in the text of the proposed legislation.  

       The influence of lobbyists provides additional evidence that the diffusion of power at the federal level, instead of protecting or promoting the interests of ordinary American citizens, has often had the opposite effect from that which Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton imagined: it has permitted the ascendancy of an influence-peddling elite who enjoy virtually unimpeded access to the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government. As of 2007, 14,826 registered lobbyists spent $2.86 billion to shape policies and legislation favorable to the interests of their individual clients.

          Between January 2009 and July 2009, four powerful financial institutions--each of which had received billions of dollars of taxpayer assistance as TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) recipients--spent millions of dollars to lobby Congress to thwart legislative efforts to increase oversight and regulation of the financial sector in the public interest. CitiGroup is reported to have spent $3.1 million dollars in those first six months, J. P. Morgan Chase, $3.1 million, and Met Life, $2 million. Morgan Stanley--which received $10 billion in TARP money--spent $1.7 million; and Wells Fargo--which received $25 billion dollars from TARP--incurred $1.4 million for lobbying at the federal level. By contrast, the Consumer Federation of America, a pro-regulation advocate, spent only $50,000 lobbying Congress.

          Equally a cause for concern, at the state and local level, political power in the United States is exercised through fifty state legislatures and executives, and thousands of administrative agencies, commissions and departments. In 2002, there were reported to be 87,525 units of local government.

          The existence of so many competing and overlapping spheres of political power creates a kind of modern-day feudalism which ensures that the influence of a few powerful and connected interests, usually monied, will be carefully considered and acknowledged while the ability of ordinary citizens to influence these political entities is negligible.

            The diffusion and distribution of political power within the political system of the United States--which reflects the fears which the Founders shared with the English philosopher John Locke of concentrated power--has today resulted in something profoundly different than what they anticipated. The liberal consensus, as we have seen, historically emerged in England as a democratic force to challenge feudal privilege and the tyranny of kings. But in the United States, where all who have been born are held to be equal before the law and where the Constitution expressly prohibits the granting of any titles of nobility, Locke's politics has created its own antithesis: rule by oligarchs and corporate plutocrats in which the rights of the some individuals are accorded a greater protection than the rights of others.

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1 Comment

George J. Forest, Jr. | December 15, 2010 9:49 PM

It is interesting to not that the U.S. Federal Government is riddled with high ranking officials with the title, "Tsar"; e.g. Energy Tsar; Terror Tsar; Cyber Tsar; etc.
Though these are unofficial titles, they still breach the spirit of our Constitution's ban on giving titles of nobility to US officials. If anything, we should avoid such titles to honor the idea that we are a nation governed by the people, for the people with all of us being of equal status in the eyes of the law.